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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Food is Always Better on a Stick

I don't know about you, but I love foods on sticks. The Renaissance Festival is my Mecca for this kind of food. Fried cheese on a stick? Yes please! Beef on a stick? Serve it up! But what about cookies on a stick? I was planning out a favor to make for my friend's upcoming baby shower and finally landed on big decorated sugar cookies. But on a stick! Genius! Lets see how I did it:

Start with a chunk of your favorite sugar cookie dough straight from the fridge. I usually break mine into three segments so that the dough stays nice and cold while you work. Also, fun little tip: I use parchment paper as my rolling surface so that when I'm all done, I can just fold up the paper and throw away all the excess flour and bits of dough in one fluid motion.

Make sure you use plenty of flour. These cookies are good and chewy and can take a lot of flour and not get too crunchy. I flour the parchment, I flour the dough, I flour the cookie cutter, I flour the dog and inevitably I flour myself. So what I'm saying is... don't be shy with the flour.

Once you've cut your cookie shapes (I chose a large round circle for this one) it is time to insert the stick. When I was trying to think about how I could describe the process of insertion, it kept coming out all jumbly so I decided to show rather than tell.

I started noticing a couple of my sticks would poke out of the cookie and I wanted to avoid them falling off the sticks, so I just patched a few where needed with some excess scraps of dough. The beauty of doing this before they bake is that the cookie will smooth itself out in the oven. Just face the smoothest side up so that the rough bits will flatten out against the cookie sheet.

Bake these per your standard cookie instructions. Mine went a good 13 minutes because I wanted to make sure they weren't too soft.

Next up... decorating! For this particular batch, I already had a design in mind. But how cute would these look with rainbow colors all swirled together like one of those giant lollipops you get at an amusement park?